Another dot is going to be added to this chart, in line with the distribution you see here. You get to choose what the X value of the dot is — and your aim is to get a Y value of greater than zero. So here’s the question: at what value of X are you […]
Economists often get criticised for trying to emulate physicists by arriving at a set of equations that describe human behaviour. There have been innumerable critiques of that approach and the predictive power of economic models is notoriously poor. This article was written in 1986 but feels as if it could have been written yesterday. …economics, […]
Fortuitously stumbled across this while looking for something else. Arthur Grimes investigates the Arbee: In his “Life Among the Econ” Axel Leijonhufvud took an ethnographic approach to describing the Econ tribe and, especially, two of its components: the Macro and the Micro. My purpose is to delve further into the life of the Macro, specifically […]
A couple of weeks ago Matt and I had the pleasure of attending the annual NZAE conference in Palmerston North. Attendance was disappointingly low, which I blame on Palmy, but it was great fun nonetheless. For that we can thank Seamus, who blogs at Offsetting Behaviour: he organised the whole thing, presented a couple of […]
Mark Blaug in 1997: Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing. To pick […]
I get it: economists aren’t cool. It’s fashionable to complain about them without understanding the first thing about the discipline. Ordinarily that sort of thing is easy to ignore. But sometimes, though very rarely, it produces that special sort of stupid that you can’t help but cherish! Today is one of those beautiful days and […]